Sometimes I go back and read a book I meant to read in the past or one I should have read in the past. Such was the case recently with Derek Thomas’ How the Gospel Brings Us All the Way Home, an explanation and celebration of Romans chapter 8 which is without doubt one of…
Reading Jerry Bridges is invariably good for my soul. He had such a way of reaching deep into the Bible to draw out helpful, heartfelt application. In his book on humility (release posthumously) he offers application that seems particularly appropriate to a time of political turmoil and disunity, and to a time of deep national…
Do you remember Pepé Le Pew? Pepé was a skunk, one of the classic characters from Looney Tunes. He was known for two things: His obsession with finding amour (love, that is) and his unbearable stink. These factors were constantly and comically at cross purposes. If you remember watching those cartoons, you no doubt remember…
One of my favorite parts of vacation is visiting new churches, sometimes close by and sometimes far away. I enjoy meeting new people, of course, and experiencing Christian fellowship with them. But I also love seeing how other churches worship—what songs they sing, how they structure their services, how they read and pray, how they…
Every couple of summers my whole family vacations together. When I say “my whole family,” I mean my parents, their 5 children, their 4 children-in-law, and a small hoard of grandchildren. That’s a crowd of 26 people all told. Needless to say, we have to search far and wide to find accommodations for that many…
One mark of a successful sermon is that it satisfactorily answers some questions while provoking still others. On Sunday I visited a little church in an eastern-Ontario village and heard just such a sermon. The pastor preached on Ephesians 4 as part of a series on the Christian’s identity in Christ, but as he continued…
Yesterday I shared a short article about working well–about doing our work in a way that pleases God. We looked at some verses from the book of Ephesians but didn’t quite get through them, so today I want to carry on. Paul began by saying that Christians are to work and followed that by saying…
It seems appropriate that during a season when so many of us—myself included—are enjoying times of vacation, we should pause to consider matters of work and vocation. I was recently brushing up on some of these things myself, especially as they are laid out in the book of Ephesians. There we find Paul addressing the…
Today I want us to travel together into the past, to England in the late 1700’s. King George III is on the throne, though this is before the madness that would mark his final days. The Industrial Revolution is well underway and life is changing as people begin a great migration to the cities to…
You know you ought to pray. You know that God invites and even commands you to pray. He loves to hear from you, loves to know you. Yet there are times when your soul feels bone dry, when even opening your mouth to pray seems an impossibility. What do you do? Just Pray Perhaps the…
You, Christian, are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit of God makes his habitation within you. He has joyfully, willingly, come to you so you can be near to him. This knowledge, this wonder, has powerful consequences. It gives assurance. If the Holy Spirit has made his home within you, you…
Is the Reformation over? Have the issues that divided Protestants and Catholics been sufficiently resolved that we can now pursue a return to unity? At the very end of his book Rescuing the Gospel, an account of the Protestant Reformation, Erwin Lutzer offers a compelling answer. While he admits that both Protestantism and Catholicism have…
Baseball returns this evening from its annual mid-season classic. As the teams prepare to take the field I find myself thinking about the game I love, the game that has gripped and fascinated me for as long as I can remember. It is, to my mind, the best sport, the perfect game. As a child…
My family lives in the poorest section of one of Canada’s wealthiest towns. Work brought us here sixteen years ago, and we bought the only house we could afford—a forty-year-old thousand-square-foot townhouse surrounded by much newer homes that are five, six, and seven times more expensive than ours. With a brief, five-minute drive we cruise…
John MacArthur has had a long, faithful, fruitful ministry unblemished by great scandal. For decades he has maintained a tight focus on teaching the Bible verse by verse and book by book. In 2006 he taught through 1 Timothy 4 and there he saw Paul providing his young protégé with “a rich summary of all…
No Bible, no breakfast. Have you ever heard this little phrase? Has anyone ever told you to obey it? It’s a mantra that I have bumped into a number of times in the past few weeks. In one recent case a popular Christian leader held it up as a necessary motto for the believer, a…
“Husbands, love your wives” (Ephesians 5:25a). On the one hand it is such a simple statement, a simple command. Simply love. On the other hand there is not a husband in the world who would say that he has mastered it. Behind the simple command is a lifetime of effort, a lifetime of growth. How…
I need a vacation. Over the years I’ve learned to identify the signs. I’ve learned to spot the difficulty in getting out of bed, the lack of creativity I bring to my vocation, the extra cup of coffee I find myself craving in mid-afternoon. I enjoy the blessing of being able to do what I…
How much television do you think you watch? No, honestly, how much? And how much time do you give to other screens—your mobile phone, your tablet, and whatever it is you use to watch Netflix? A brand new study from Nielsen suggests that it is a lot. A heap. A ton. Way more than you…
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, recently shared a picture of himself celebrating a milestone: Instagram now has five hundred million active users each month. There was Zuckerberg in his office holding an Instagram-like frame in front of himself. The picture would have been unremarkable and quickly forgotten but for this: Astute observers noticed that his…